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The Lost City
The Lost City is the tenth level of Crash Bandicoot. After a dramatic confrontation with Ripper Roo in his backwoods boom-boom shack at the top of some lame waterfall, Crashie is now back at the bottom of the waterfall, for no good reason! Here, he finds himself immersed in the ancient ruins of a city. A lost city named Nativopolis, from the ruined New Nativitan Empire. Um. Seriously? How do you lose a fucking city? Cities are big, by definition! It would be seriously hard to lose a city, wouldn't it? WOULDN'T IT??? I mean, what the hell, Naughty Dog? WHAT THE HELL??? Patrolling the ancient streets and rooftops are fearsome beasts the likes of which you could not possibly imagine - Dr. Leap-N. Lizard, and his quadripedal counterpart, Senator Newt Green-grich. But most creepy of all are the laughs of Ripper Roo, still echoing through the countryside, haunting Crashie....forever. Oh, sorry, that's just the screeching of Uncle Cortie's Patented Single-File Bat-tle Units. Nevermind. The Unreturnable Present of Creepily Obsessing Over the Past: An In-Depth Exploration of the Fall of the New Nativitan Empire via Ill-Advised Application of Incoherent Gem Symbolism If you're like me - and, at the very least, you might be of the same species - you're probably curious as to what destroyed the magnificent homeland of the noble New Nativitanians. It's one of the best-kept secrets in the Crashie the Bandicootie series, due to developer secrecy, and also, developer laziness. Tonight, we pull back the curtain on history, and dive headfirst into the giant Jello-brand gelatin pool of time, to discover the secrets of an empire, lost....to history and/or time. To uncover the secret, we must look closely at the intriguing and delicious clue left for us by the ancients. This stage contains the first coloured Gem one can obtain in the game. But it's not just any colour. This Gem is the Green Gem. It is called this, because its colour is green. Green symbolizes many things. Nature is one of them. The Nativitanians were obviously living as one with the nature, as evidenced by the fact that they built Nativopolis (as well as their other major city, West McMacintosh) on top of a swamp for some reason. Lousy fucking place for a city, I'd think, but who am I to argue? The Nativitanians liked their nature. That's the point. As the colour green also symbolizes, they probably also liked their marijuana. They were sooooooo high, all the time. This explains why they actually thought it was a good idea to eschew staircases in favour of a haphazardly placed series of moving platforms over gigantic torches as the primary means to climb to the upper levels of their city. Goddamn hippies. But furthermore, green symbolizes the fan-favourite emotion, envy. The Nativitanians were envious of literally everyone else, across the globe. "Why should those Britishes get to drink tea when we don't", they asked. "Why do those Chinamen get to eat tasty, tasty rice? Why do those Africans get to have such pretty skin, and also, those sexy lips with giant manhole covers in them? Why do those Russians get to eat potatoes in the form of liquid alcohol?" His envy drove Emperor Wuu to declare war against literally every other country on Earth. Needless to say, he lost. Emperor Wuu lost. His efficient and extremely impressive army of several extremely, extremely high Nativitanian men somehow failed to wipe out the armies of every other nation in the world. They hilariously could not even defeat the fucking French. And since every single male was forced to enlist in the military, there was no one left to impregnate the women. Well, except for Emperor Wuu. But Wuu, he did not like the sex, for it inexplicably caused discomfort-inducing penile swelling. Eeeewwwwwwww. As such, his tribe could not reproduce, and they died out. All because of ill-advised wars. Goddamn hippies. This is clearly the story this Green Gem was meant to tell, and we should all be grateful to Emperor Wuu for leaving it behind so as to inform future generations of his Empire's historically significant warlike canna-balism. Now that we've peeled back the many crusty layers of history's mysteries, we can now finally devour the glorious onion of knowledge. You're welcome. Trivia *This level's title is a reference to the independently produced 1935 film serial of the same name. The serial is set in a lost civilization in the jungles of Africa, much as this stage is, but in the jungles of Wumpa Island. The villain of the serial, the nefarious Dr. N. Manyus, turned the spider-worshipping Wanga tribe into white burly-haired midgets, in exactly the same way as the villain of this game, Dr. N. Cortex, is turning all the animals in this archipelago into disturbing anthropomorphic beasts. It's borderline plagiarism, folks! *Several real world locations are referred to as "lost cities" as well, perhaps most notably the famous Lost City of Atlantis, said to have sunk into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune". Due to this undersea association, contemporary fantasy portrayals of Atlantis sometimes involve mermaids or "reverse mermaids", also tying into Cortex's well-known animal-crossing schemes surprisingly well.